As technology is increasingly necessary for more aspects of society, easing accessibility by lowering the technical and skill barrier for operation is vital. Humans use natural languages such as English and Spanish for communication and information processing. Technology does not. This divide is a major obstacle to lowering the technological barrier and is a long-standing problem in computational linguistics. One factor in this problem is the polysemy common in many natural languages, i.e., one word can have numerous senses. Word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods disambiguate a word's sense based on its context. How to choose a valid sense of a word with multiple senses based on context proves to be very difficult for technology even after twenty years of research in bridging the divide, but is routinely mastered by children. A solution to this problem will alter every intersection between humans and technology from a television remote to computer programming.
For example, when using Internet search engines, users input a few keywords that are used to form a query. Determining the senses of these keywords is essential for the quality of retrieved documents. Any mismatch between expectations and results is typically an error attributed to the user. As such, a kind of art form has developed from the ability to divine meaningful search terms. This requirement of skill is a barrier preventing adoption of technology. Considering other scenarios where technology must understand the sense of a word, in machine translation, before a sentence or phrase can be translated from one natural language to another language the machine translator needs to understand the senses of each word. Even a simple machine proofreader is likely to overlook errors of polysemy. As such, the importance of word sense disambiguation (“WSD”) cannot be overemphasized.